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Rogers Shrinks Download Limits As Netflix Arrives
Meshach writes "Hot on the heels of Netflix coming to Canada, Rogers (one of the biggest ISPs in Canada) has shrunk download limits. 'As of Wednesday, new customers who sign up for the Lite service will be allowed 15 gigabytes, a drop from the 25 GB limit offered to those who signed up before July 21. Meanwhile, any new Lite user who goes over the monthly limit will have to pay $4 per GB up to a maximum of $50 — a spike from the previous $2.5 per GB surcharge.' Officially, there is no connection between the two events, but it seems an odd coincidence, especially when Rogers charges customers who exceed their bandwidth allowance."
I like how the overflow bandwidth costs over 500% wholesale costs. $4.5 is just insane. I almost wonder if 3G bandwidth isn't cheaper than that. Just goes to show that they aren't doing this in order to offer everyone a good service, but rather to punish and blackmail moderate users into buying a higher tier subscription service.
I can understand limits on consumer lines. You can have fast and cheap, but not all the time if you want fast all the time it costs more. Ok, but that still needs to be a reasonable amount. The 250GB cap Comcast does is quite reasonable. That's enough to do a whole lot and never get near it. Mainly the compulsive torrenters are the ones affected. But 15GB? That is just stupidly low. You can hit that without Netflix. Surf the web regularly, watch Youtube, download some game patches and you are there.
Talk about unreasonable :P.
Boycott Rogers.
And switch to what, exactly?
They have a geographical monopoly across virtually all of Canada. If you live in an area serviced by them, you have a choice between Rogers and Rogers. Are you seriously asking people to give up entirely on the internet?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
And switch to what, exactly?
DSL. If you can't live without cable modem, then that's the choice you've made. Those with more flexible connectivity criteria have more options and are not tied to the cable company (Rogers or otherwise). You're pretty much in a "Doctor, it hurts when I do this" situation.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
This is just the opening shot in the upcoming battle between cable providers that want you to use *their* on-demand movie systems vs Netflix and similar companies. It's not surprising it happened with Rogers first, but this will inevitably happen in the US too. Netflix's streaming of movies is the residential ISP's worst nightmare come true. They'll be in a position where they have to tell their customers that something they used to be able to do for no additional cost will suddenly become a new confusing expense showing up on their cable bill with no apparent additional benefit to the customer.
I switched to Teksavvy Cable a month ago and it's awesome. No throttling, 200GB cap, and 10/1 speeds for $42. You can't match that with any other provider in Toronto.
This is obviously abusing a semi-monopoly to conduct price gouging, and the government should intervene.
Typical prices ISPs will pay for is the mere one-time cost of network equipment plus ~$25/Megabit/Mo, for a commitment to transfer data, the price is typically the same no matter how much data's transferred as long as the 95th-percentile traffic rate's not over the commit (95th percentile billing on a burstable link), otherwise known as $25,000/month per gigabit.
Sometimes an ISP might buy more bandwidth at different times of the day than others, but, in any case, they would do that because the cost is less, not more than the typical market rates.
Over a 1000Mbps backhaul, approximately 800 customers can be downloading 1 Megabit continuously 24/7, at an approximate avg cost to the ISP of $3125 per customer for that data, but in that case, 324000MB is transferred per customer on avg per month, resulting that each Megabyte transferred costs the ISP approximately $0.009 per megabyte.
Web hosting providers will typically charge $0.15 to $0.80 per GB per month on average.
Roger's "overage pricing" is like 4X the rate charged by even the most greedy of hosting providers.
At the same time, they are pushing their Rogers on Demand service to all their customers too. http://www.rogersondemand.com/
Which means either charging people to watch TV content by 'downloading' it, or maybe, will they give a break to people who are on their network to use their service?
This is precisely why net neutrality is important and required.
Yeah, and Aurora is... owned by Rogers. Look at http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2008/13/c9876.html
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
You failed to mention that Rogers Video is one of the largest chains of movie rental shops in Canada. That's what makes this an especially weird coincidence.
At one point, I couldn't get a cell phone from Rogers the telco, apparently because I owed some late fees to Rogers the movie rental shop, which I could only pay at the movie shop. So I went with another telco. Weird, anyway; I hadn't realized they were all so tightly connected.
You'd think that slash-dotters would know better...
The smaller companies in no way resell Bell services. They provide their own. They do lease the last mile and transit to their centers..
"The avalanche has already started. It's too late for the pebbles to vote." - Kosh
(sorry for length, hope this might be helpful, probably overstaing obvious, anyways.....)
I don't want to bash Rogers, they paid me a good salary and I had a great experience working there many years ago.
I'm far removed from the company now, but I *think* and it appears marketing/management strategy remains unchanged.
My experience though in sales has been that the marketing and upper management has some strange way of making promotions and changing products for better (and unfortunately) worse. Most of the promotions are pretty positive and get a lot of new customers and sales for cable, PPV, specialty channels and Internet. This new download cap probably won't be a problem since most customers don't use or understand the Internet much. I'll bet most are just check e-mail and news and won't even use close to 15 GB. I'd be more concerned if I were a parent. Kids with an XBox 360 or PS3, what with downloading patches, playing online, demos and Torrent, Netflix, Youtube, blah blah blah. The parents don't use the net much, but the kids you can't control and the kids and parents probably don't realize how much is being downloaded.
I makes no sense to me that it would cost the ISP (Rogers) more for bandwidth as time goes on. I would think bandwidth costs would decrease and extra services like mail servers (a lot use Gmail, hotmail), news servers are no more, and I would think less people have 'homepages'.
Rogers is not unlike Bell, Shaw and to the US neighbors AT&T and Sprint etc in that they like any company wanting to make a profit and draw people away from competitors. Bell also has TV/Satellite offerings. So given industry trends, I won't be surprised if this bandwidth change is directly related to a conflict of interest, one they know the CRTC won't touch or are too slow to move.
I live in Vancouver, so I've also the opportunity as with Ontario and Quebec residents, to be a TekSavvy customer. It costs me more with a dry line, but well worth escaping the Telus or Shaw. Bonus - they are more than generous with bandwidth. I'm happy with service - as long as Telus doesn't start pissing me off by trying to get the useless CRTC to cap non Telus DSL subscribers on their loop. As taxpayers, we've more than subsided the Ma Bells - to the point these should probably be considered public infrastructure.
Internet connections are grossly oversold. I worked in an ISP once, where the upstream we had was sufficient to cover ONE full-use customer. At any given time, there were 50 online. Because of how people used the connections (net surfing, checking e-mail) the burst was fine. But anyone who tried a sustained transfer was getting garbage. And there were times of day when even the bursty nature of customer usage was too much, and the network was dogg-slow. Of course, we blamed it on DSL routing and old telephone lines. But the fact was the last mile was owned by a telco who re-sold bulk access to us for more than they charged customers directly. So we had to charge as little as possible (which was always more than them, of course), and set up with as small of an overhead buffer as possible.
ISP's are just expensive. Customer service people don't come cheap, compared to how much people pay (if net on each customer is $10 a month, a minimum of 500 customers' worth of income just goes to one person to handle all of the phone calls. With 500 customers, there will be 5 or so that demand attention every hour of every waking bloody day. Add in actual engineers, advertising, the shrinking revenue base... it's tough. One big corner that basically has to be cut is upstream. The question is how deeply you cut. And when you're looking at cutting back something many people wouldn't notice, or cutting your own salary to shreds, most people go for the former.
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